See the opening of "Listing;" wander an "empty" mansion before designers take over; Catch Janna Ireland's new show, also see Planet City, Impossible Drawings, Candida Höfer before they close
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It’s great to be back with you in 2025. I hope you are safe from the winds and fire and are ready for some Design Things To Do.
I am writing to you from London, which is cold and gray — and raining tweets from Elon Musk! The man simply cannot stay out of British politics. It's hard to believe that this is the same Musk as the goofy, suave nerd who talked to me so charmingly, on this DnA, about his breakthrough, all-electric, Tesla Model S when it launched thirteen years ago. I’ve often said he struck me then as a cross between James Bond and Q. Now, I wonder if he is becoming Blofeld!
The trip across the pond was to see family and to check out the latest goings-on, but I caught a nasty bug so I’ve spent a week in bed, dreaming of California… of old.
Before the London stop, we made a long overdue trip to Córdoba, Granada, and Seville in Andalusia, Spain.
Muqarnas — honeycombed squinches, arches, vaults, and domes — grace the Alhambra. Photo by Frances Anderton.
Of course, we visited the Alhambra at Granada — the sublime Islamic palace wrapped in a fortress that sits atop the Sierra Nevada mountains — whose melting snowy peaks fed the builders' brilliant system of water channels, wells, and reservoirs that turned this craggy site into a garden of Eden.
We also wandered through more modest versions of Moorish courtyard housing centered on “paradise” gardens — the patios of Cordoba: whitewashed, red tile roofed, structures wrapped around courts — often multiple, with theatrically labyrinthine pathways and staircases. These courts bring in sunlight and cooling and shading in careful measure while serving as a canvas for decorative tile fountains and floors, ornately carved woods, and additional charms like hanging flowerpots, shown.
As we know, early twentieth-century Californian designers repurposed this typology for houses and apartment buildings not for multi-generational, self-contained households of yore, but for the car-driving ingenues of 1920s Hollywood. Buildings like The Andalusia (literally!), built by Arthur and Nina Zwebell, were the perfect romantic backdrop for the theatre of life.
Still, I wasn’t ready for just how direct the influence was. We walked into one courtyard in Granada and hubby remarked, “It’s exactly like my old place in Beechwood Canyon.” Of course, the influence has been hybridized, infused with other architectural styles and materials, and sometimes ramped up to a bigger scale — but at best it holds onto the sense of secrecy, private peace, and thrill upon entering, in the heart of the city, a paradise garden.
A courtyard in Cordoba. Photo by Frances Anderton.
Design Things To Do
Candida Höfer: Europa / America Sean Kelly, 1357 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles Through January 11th, 2025
Anything touched by the curatorial/architectural hand of the architecture duo Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of Johnston Marklee is worth viewing. So before it closes, catch their installation of photographs by the German photographer Candida Höfer at Sean Kelly Gallery.
They took, as a starting point, the German-Prussian architect Erich Mendelsohn’s 1929 publication, Russland Europa Amerika: Ein architektonischer Querschnitt (An Architectural Cross Section), and selected ten photographs of interior spaces "primarily intended for entertainment, study, and worship, in North American and Europe" — taken by Höfer between 1993 and 2015. Primarily symmetrical, axial, with saturated color and detail, they evoke, says the gallery, "both vastness and intimacy, transforming each location into its own, complex world."
Candida Höfer; Masonic Temple Philadelphia I 2007; C-print. Image courtesy Sean Kelly
Party in an empty mansion! Pasadena Showcase House of Design: "Empty House Party" Bauer Estate & Gardens January 10th, 6:30 PM (general public)
For 60 years, a grand manse in Pasadena has been given an interior makeover for the charitable Pasadena Showcase House of Design. But how about seeing the house before the designers get started?
That's possible this Friday when you can meander through this year's Showcase House location, the Bauer Estate and Gardens. The 15,000 square feet Monterey Colonial home was designed by Reginald D. Johnson and built by Peter Hall — leading Pasadena architects and builders. The five acres of sweeping grounds were landscaped by Katherine Bashford (Thornton Gardens and Pepperdine University).
Mingling in the "empty house" will be the designers for the Showcase House, armed with swatches, mood boards, and ideas for making over the venerable old interiors. Come back in spring and see how they did. The transformed Showcase House of Design opens April 20th–May 18th.
Click here for tickets, and details for getting to the Bauer Estate.
The Bauer Estate and Gardens. Image courtesy Pasadena Showcase House of Design
Listing A play asks if preservation can go too far... January 16th–February 16th, Thursdays–Saturdays at 7:30 PM; Sundays at 2:00 PM. January 19th, panel discussion: Landmark or Home? Mary Levin Cutler Theatre, 241 So. Moreno Dr., Beverly Hills, CA.
Not everyone would find storytelling possibilities in architectural preservation but FORT: LA founder Russell Brownhas done so in a new play. Listing is about the sale of a classic Modernist house by an Austrian emigre (modeled on Rudolph Schindler/Richard Neutra) and the drama that ensues when the realtor, a fanatical preservationist, tries to steer the house to a buyer he thinks will make no changes to it.
The play, directed by Tom Lazarus for Theatre 40 company, is fun, dramatic, and even has a touch of the supernatural. Along the way, it teases out LA's race and class tensions and celebrates the Southland's design heritage while asking if architectural preservation can go too far...
Following its 2:00 PM matinee on January 19th, I will lead a panel about its themes. Guests are Brian Linder, the realtor who served as the inspiration for the lead character; architect Dan Brunn, and Chris Nichols, writer and famed LA preservationist.
Lazarus, incidentally, has carved out a niche in theater about LA early Modernists — he wrote The Princes of Kings Road, the delightful play performed a few years back at the Neutra offices in Silver Lake, which dramatized the moment the estranged Schindler and Neutra found themselves in the same hospital room.
And if you need even more drama about utopian architects, get over to a screening of The Brutalist, which just swept the Golden Globes!
Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90027 January 16th–September 27th, 2025
Noted photographer Janna Ireland (Regarding Paul R. Williams) brings her subtle eye for building details, light, and spirit to the Hollyhock House. An exhibition of the resulting images opens next week, at Barnsdall Art Park.
The exhibition title comes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography, in which he describes the fraught process of realizing the historic project. Ireland says, “I regard the story of Hollyhock House, and how it came to be in spite of the often contentious relationship between heiress Aline Barnsdall and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, as one of the great LA stories. It is a tale of ego and conflicting ambitions, as so many of the best stories are. My photographs are about light and shadow, wood and concrete, and the labor involved in preserving Wright and Barnsdall’s complicated project for future generations.”
Celebrate Vitality! And Impossible Drawings! A+D Museum 170 S. La Brea Ave. Ste.102, Los Angeles, CA 90036 Wednesday–Sunday: 12:00–6:00 PM
January 13th, Impossible Drawings
Before the young Thom Mayne started building his highly complex structures, he drew them, in intricate, intense drawings that were artworks in themselves. Now he is honoring another generation of practitioners of the art of Impossible Drawings, with a show at A+D Museum of "works by architects that push the boundaries of design through the reimagining of two-dimensional media." That show, featuring works by Peter Baldwin, Perry Kulper, Neil Spiller, Bryan Cantley, and Bea Martin, closes January 13th.
January 16th, Celebrate Vitality Fundraiser
Then comes the museum's Celebrate Vitality gala — aimed at raising the funds to help the museum keep going as a "vital platform for contemporary architecture and design issues as it has done, through thick and thin, since its founding in 2001."
Views of Planet City Pacific Design Center Gallery Through January 26th, 2025 Thursday–Sunday, 11 PM–5 PMf AND SCI Arc Gallery Through February 14th, 2025 Monday–Friday, 10 AM–6 PM, Saturday–Sunday, 12 PM–6 PM
Last chance to catch this exhibition in two parts — at the PDC or SCI-Arc — that brings to life -- with architectural models, costumes, and digital storytelling -- Planet City. This is a "future city for 10 billion people," conceived by world builder and SCI-Arc professor Liam Young, with collaborators including costume designer Ann Crabtree, and speculative fiction designers Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Damjan Jovanovic, and Angelica Lorenzi.
In this gigatropolis, explains SCI-Arc, "all of Earth’s human population has retreated, surrendering the remainder of the planet to a global-scaled wilderness and the return of stolen lands." Young, who has been working on Planet City for several years, and created these exhibitions as part of PST: Art & Science Collide, took as his starting point biologist Edward O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” proposal "to remove at least 50% of our planet’s land and marine areas from human use and set them aside for preservation of the planet’s ecosystems and regeneration of biodiversity."
"Of course it's not realistic," he told me a few years back. "It is a provocation based on very real desires and trends — which include degrowth and densifying megalopolises, the quest for more communitarian living in reaction to rampant and individualistic capitalism, reuse of existing urban fabric, grief at species extinction, dominance of data-driven tech and the need for ancient ritual."
One of my guilty pleasures is self-checkout. And yet, this story in The Atlantic about how Self-Checkout is a grand "failed experiment" is reassuring; evidence perhaps that not all human jobs are going to be gobbled up by the giant maw of automation, and an intriguing explainer of a technology that has defied efforts to iron out its wrinkles.
Photo by Frances Anderton
Love Letter to the TSA
The Christmas movie Carry On, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, is a fun, psycho-action drama featuring a buff Taryn Egerton as a beleaguered TSA worker blackmailed into allowing a bag of very bad stuff through a luggage scanner. I enjoyed it mostly for its Pleasantville-like depiction of LAX and the TSA! In this alternative universe, the airport is a shiny, efficient hub, where traffic and people move smoothly, and telegenic TSA staff operate gleaming security machines, josh with each other gently, and smile at small children. TSA could not have paid for a better promotional video for this under-respected profession.
Image courtesy Netflix.
Beyond Land Acknowledgments
If you find Land Acknowledgments to be virtuous but vacuous, worthy but weightless, you might like this NYT thinkpiece. The historian Kathleen DuVal argues that "instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations" (of which there are 574 federally recognized tribes.) Certainly, some LA institutions are working to turn words into deeds, such as Clockshop arts organization, which offers this "Action Plan that goes beyond Land Acknowledgment." Its helpful prompts range from donating land to helping pull weeds at the gorgeous Kuruvungna Springs in West Los Angeles, below (covered in this KCRW story).
Kuruvungna Springs in West Los Angeles welcomes volunteers. Photo by Frances Anderton.
Well, that's it for now. I have a plane to catch, back to LA, weather permitting! Good luck with your New Year's resolutions, and keep me posted about events in your world.
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